Bon Bock Café

Style of Edouard Manet

National Gallery of Art

We are in the warmly lit interior of a café where a pale-skinned woman stands in profile at a dark wooden bar that extends away from us in this horizontal painting. The woman stands behind the bar to our left and faces our right. She has upswept brown hair and wears a navy-blue dress. The entire scene is loosely painted, and the elevated area just beyond the woman is especially loose, built up with thick strokes of seafoam green, black, and daubs of white. A cluster of vertical amber-colored, brown, and light grass-green strokes suggest bottles sitting along its top. Another object, perhaps a tall chalice, sits on the top of the bar, which is painted with a swipe of white paint. Crimson-red and pine-green daubs just beyond it suggest flowers. The room is painted in shades of slate blue, tan, butter and mustard yellow, with sage green creating cool shadows. A column near the center of the room, beyond the bar, divides the scene vertically. To our the right is a piece of wooden furniture with a small table and chair placed before it. A tall brass chandelier hanging above has three arms curving upward to support silvery globes. A dark blue object, perhaps a hat, hangs on the wall nearby. To the right of the chandelier is a roughly painted rectangle filled with soft blue, white, and pink shapes that suggests a mirror or window into another room. In the background, the lower half of the far corner is stone blue and cinnamon brown. The painting is dated in the lower left, “Juin 1881.”